Ulrich Tilgner

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Ulrich Tilgner in January 2011

Ulrich Tilgner (born January 16, 1948 in Bremen ) is a German journalist , foreign correspondent and non-fiction author . He became known as a war correspondent from Baghdad .

Career

Ulrich Tilgner grew up in Bremen and attended the Alte Gymnasium from 1958 to 1966 . After his military service he studied empirical cultural studies , political science and economic history in Freiburg im Breisgau and Tübingen . For a year he was an employee of the Baden-Württemberg State Office for Monument Protection before he became an employee of the SDR in 1976 . In 1979 he switched to the dpa news agency and was the head of duty at the dpa regional office in Southwest. Since 1980 Tilgner has reported as a correspondent for dpa as well as for several newspapers, Deutsche Welle TV, ARD , ZDF and Swiss television from the Near and Middle East .

From 1986 to 2001 he was based in Amman , Jordan . In 1991 ( Second Gulf War ) and 2003 ( Iraq War ) he was a war correspondent in Baghdad. He is not the “classic war reporter”: “I followed this region for 25 years. It was therefore only logical to go to Baghdad. ”In 2002 Tilgner took over the management of the ZDF office in Tehran . From 2006 to April 2008 he was also the ZDF special correspondent for the Near and Middle East, particularly Afghanistan and Iraq . As of April 2008, Tilgner ended his collaboration with ZDF and reported mainly for Swiss television , since in Switzerland, on the other hand, programs such as Tagesschau or 10vor10 are institutions where he has not yet seen any interference with his work. He has been retired since the beginning of 2015.

Tilgner is married to a journalist and has two grown children from his first marriage.

Hanns Joachim Friedrichs Prize

In 2003 Ulrich Tilgner received the Hanns Joachim Friedrichs Prize for TV Journalism alongside Antonia Rados for his reporting from Baghdad. The reasoning stated that both had "endeavored with perseverance and success to maintain an overview, to formulate precisely, and to avoid adventurism and partisanship, even under the pressure of armed conflict and the restricted freedom of information."

BND affair

In connection with the spying of journalists in Afghanistan in 2006, it became known that Tilgner was also spied on in 2007.

Exit and criticism of ZDF

According to his own admission from dissatisfaction with the working conditions (interference with the freedom of the press and alliance considerations) in Germany, Tilgner let his contract with ZDF expire in 2010. Tilgner criticized, among other things, that, in his opinion, there was a lack of independence on ZDF and, since Gerhard Schröder, a tendency towards " embedded journalism ". Tilgner, like Wolfgang Herles , finds many programs to be boulevard-esque and pious to the government. A closed cycle was created, "in which journalists are the addressees of symbolic politics and the truth falls by the wayside".

reception

Between War and Terror (2007)

In the opinion of Rainer Burchardt , Tilgner resists the temptation to take a clear and one-sided side: “He is sharply judging the fanatics and missionaries on both sides. The Bush administration's crusade thinking is denounced as well as fundamentalist Islamism. ”Despite a“ squeamish avoidance ”in places, Tilgner leaves no doubt that the key to solving the Middle East conflict lies in Washington and the first stage of a comprehensive conception of peace an end to the Israel conflict must be. Tilgner's perplexity at the end can be understood with Kofi Annan's thesis on the catastrophic failure of political ability.

Andreas Pflitsch, on the other hand, finds “the clichés of Islam and Christianity as incorrigible antipodes” in Tilgner. He got entangled in the ideologue of the clash of cultures, behind which lies a “cramped search for a European identity” and the ignoring of common roots. Apart from that, the two main chapters on the Iranian nuclear program and the “war on terror” make the book recommendable for the reviewer. In a good investigative tradition, Tilgner wrote about "current power politics and its mendacity, about open diplomatic faults and misunderstandings that seem subliminal."

The logic of weapons. Western Politics in the Orient (2012)

Michael Lüders calls Ulrich Tilgner's monograph a “courageous and factual book that should shame the vast majority of Western politicians and editorialists.” The aim of the USA is to overthrow the Islamic order in Iran and restore pro-Western conditions. According to Tilgner, Obama's strategy of economic sanctions could not work because the Iranian opposition would lose its support. Tilgner sees the connection to Syria, because the weapons supplies for the Lebanese Hezbollah take place via Syria. The overthrow of Assad is therefore a prerequisite for the United States to destroy the “Shiite axis”. The Syrian people are paying the price for this power game. Tilgner also sees a bleak future for Iraq and Afghanistan. Lüders praises the analyzes on the increasing privatization of American warfare, on cyber war and drone attacks, which can lead to escalations.

Media reflexes instead of information (2015)

For Tilgner, reporting on developments in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan since the turn of the millennium shows "a dramatic - and also ethical, decline in the media." "Instead of depicting the development of the failure of Western politics, it was played down and encouraged understanding for this policy." Tilgner sees examples of this in the naive and negligent endeavors of German politicians to bring about a new beginning for Afghanistan with the help of the alleged aid deployment of the Bundeswehr and far too little financial resources. In Iran, Tilgner saw how distorted Iran's position in the first Gulf War and the issue of nuclear armament was presented. His conclusion is that the media are increasingly being co-opted again, a tendency that has intensified with the “militarization of politics”.

Publications

  • Upheaval in Iran. Eyewitness accounts. Analyzes. Documents . Rowohlt, Reinbek bee Hamburg 1983, ISBN 3-499-14441-7 .
  • The staged war. Deception and Truth in the Overthrow of Saddam Hussein . Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2003, ISBN 3-87134-492-3 .
  • Between war and terror. The clash of Islam and Western politics in the Middle East . C. Bertelsmann, Bielefeld 2006, ISBN 3-570-00932-7 .
  • The logic of weapons. Western politics in the Orient . Orell Füssli, Zurich 2012, ISBN 978-3-280-05489-5 .
  • Restricted freedom of movement. Journalistic work in war and crisis regions , in: Löffelholz et al. (Ed.): War and crisis reporting, Copyright by UVK 2008 [1]
  • Media reflexes instead of information. Wrong impressions from Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan in: Ronald Thoden (Ed.): ARD & Co. - How the media manipulate. Volume 1. Selbrund, Frankfurt am Main 2015, ISBN 978-3-9816963-7-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.berliner-zeitung.de/archiv/korrespondent-ulrich-tilgner-sucht-mehr-distanz-zum-zdf--ich-fuehle-mich-eingeschraenk-,10810590,10535438.html , accessed on 9 February 2015
  2. ↑ Simon Widmer: "Anyone who does not travel to Tunisia now will help the terrorists." The Middle East Clarifier. In: SonntagsZeitung on July 5, 2015
  3. ↑ Simone Matthieu: Ulrich Tilgner: The diva among the foreign correspondents.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Tages-Anzeiger .ch / Newsnet from June 19, 2009@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.tagesanzeiger.ch  
  4. ^ Website of the Hanns Joachim Friedrichs Prize, 2003
  5. ↑ dpa / sa: BND affair: ZDF journalist Tilgner was also spied on. In: welt.de . April 24, 2008, accessed October 7, 2018 .
  6. ↑ Hans Leyendecker , Christopher Keil: Ulrich Tilgner in conflict with the ZDF. Sore . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , January 30, 2008. Accessed August 12, 2010.
  7. ^ Crisis reports from the Arab world , Stuttgarter Zeitung on March 26, 2011
  8. ↑ - The hopelessness of the Middle East conflict . In: Deutschlandradio Kultur . ( deutschlandradiokultur.de [accessed on April 10, 2017]).
  9. ↑ Andreas Pflitsch: The world has more than two camps . In: the daily newspaper . ( taz.de [accessed on April 10, 2017]).
  10. ↑ Michael Lüders: The logic of weapons . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, November 20, 2012 (press pool), p. 15 http://www.ulrich-tilgner.de/rezension-die-logik-der-waffen/
personal data
SURNAME Tilgner, Ulrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist and author
DATE OF BIRTH January 16, 1948
PLACE OF BIRTH Bremen